What’s new with The Baby Boomer Entrepreneur
Just before Christmas I was notified that I’ve been named winner of Broadview Network’s 2013 Best Blogs for Entrepreneurs Award. 
I put a lot of effort into each of my posts so it is exciting to be acknowledged.
It’s a great way to end 2013. I’m looking forward to bigger and better things for 2014.
Andrea Stenberg
p.s. Please leave a comment and tell me what topics you’d like to see in the blog for 2014.
Thanks to my colleague Jeff Apton, I recently discovered the report The Coming Entrepreneurship Boom from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. This study states that in the United States an entrepreneurial boom is looming; a boom created by baby boomers.
Apparently, Americans aged 55 to 64 are more likely to become entrepreneurs than those aged 20 to 34. For many people this statistic is counter-intuitive. Younger people are more likely to take risks, right?
Wrong! According to this particular study, “In every single year from 1996 to 2007, Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 had a higher rate of entrepreneurial activity than those aged 20-34.”
How much higher? One third.
But that’s not all. The study also notes that “a longitudinal survey of nearly 5,000 companies that began in 2004, two-thirds of firm founders are between the ages of 35 and 54.”
What are the causes of this baby boomer boom? The study suggests Read More→
Last week LinkedIn announced it was adding Twitter to the list of applications you can add to your LinkedIn profile.
How to Add Twitter to LinkedIn
This means you can now have Twitter update your LinkedIn status and vice versa. For someone like me who is a heavy user of both LinkedIn and Twitter, this added functionality is much appreciated.
To add Twitter, log into you LinkedIn account. From your Home page, scroll down to the bottom. On the right hand column you’ll see an “Add an application” link. Click on this and you’ll see a drop down menu similar to the one on the right. Select “Tweets” and follow the instructions. It should take you about a minute to set up.
One key feature to note is you can choose whether all your Tweets are sent to your LinkedIn status or only specific ones. This is important in my mind as many people have a more chatty style on Twitter than they might be appropriate for LinkedIn.
Retweets, links and many of the @reply conversations on Twitter really wouldn’t fit the culture of LinkedIn. If you are updating your LinkedIn status too often because you are a heavy Twitter user you run the risk of annoying your LinkedIn network.
Although, who knows: maybe over time this feature will loosen up the more formal culture of LinkedIn as people are given more of a chance to show their personality.
If you choose to limit which Tweets update your LinkedIn status Read More→
Two years and 313 blog posts later, I’m proud to say The Baby Boomer Entrepreneur is still alive and kicking. I’ve done the math, and that works out to an average of three blog posts a week. I didn’t know I had it in me.
Seriously! I am a writer, but I’ve never sustained a writing project that was quite this long. I wondered if I’d run out of ideas. However, everyone I knew who was a blogger (and I confess that two years ago it wasn’t that many) told me running out of ideas wasn’t going to be a problem.
Over the past two years I’ve learned a lot about myself, my business and who my customers are. A good part of that learning is a direct result of writing three times per week. Some of these lessons are fairly profound and some are less so. If you’ll indulge me, I’ll share some of what I’ve learned.
First, I learned I can stick to something. You’d think that after four & a half years as an entrepreneur I’d already know that. After all, you can’t stay in business that long without finishing what you start.
However, if you’re been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that I am ADD. I really have a tendency to flit from project to project as my attention wavers. Knowing I can stick to something for two whole years was a really important lesson to learn. Particularly for something like blogging which really doesn’t have an end date. There is no point where I can say “I’m done here”.
When I made the move to be a full time entrepreneur in the spring of 2005, Read More→
I just came back from a family reunion in Hodgeville Saskatchewan – population 150ish. One day my Uncle Felix and Aunt Hilda began telling stories about grandma and grandpa (that’s my great grandparents) who homesteaded there in the 1920s.
If you’re never been to southern Saskatchewan then picture bald prairie. The only trees were planted by hand and carefully watered with buckets carried from the wells. And the trees were needed to protect the houses (no R2000) from the winter winds.
It was the Depression and they were poor. Aunt Hilda spoke about grandma holding blankets over the windows during hail storms to protect them from the hail. She remembers the kids all crying because they knew what hail meant – no food. As a mother, my heart clenched at the thought of listening to the hail and knowing it meant not enough food for my kids. Read More→
